Consciousness

It may be that the only way to get into the experience of "levels" of consciousness is through metaphor, but because we now understand the rhetorical strategy of metaphor, we are cautioned to avoid unnecessary or misleading associations. The layer cake may be good for some audiences, but for those who are avidly seeking an explanation, it is probably close to worthless.

"Levels" is an odd term for what we are after. In some ways the matter of exploring consciousness is a question of focus. Here I have introduced the notion of vision, for we do not focus with any of our other senses, but we do achieve a concentration of input in listening, and touch is very much localized, if not discriminating. Taste is so closely associated with olfaction that it is hard to tell. Focus, though, is with the eyes, both in terms of distance and target. I dared to use the idea of focus because I want to introduce the associated notions of field (of vision) and the act of concentration of attention.

I have already said much about consciousness in general. It seems to be a spectrum from tight to loose focus to none at all, that is, our attention to a sensory input can be keen (tight, highly focused) or casual (loose focus) or we can be conscious and "aimed" at a sensory input, but still be oblivious to it. In other words, consciousness contains the process of attention keeping, but is not defined by attention or concentration.

Let's go back to the layer cake again and examine the notion smuggled in by the metaphor that the successive layers of the cake are similar domains. They might be alternating chocolate and vanilla layers, but they are nevertheless similar in that they are cake, meant to be eaten, and take up room ... presumably in the brain. Yet we know by the time we are five or six that our consciousness during dream states allows ideas that are impossible in real life. We fly, float, fall slowly, get lost but are magically transported to new surroundings without a pause for a theatrical aside telling us that we must suspend disbelief. Whereas, in our daily waking lives we would be quite upset to see our pet dog suddenly soar across the room and out the window, much less accompanying the dog ourselves. In other words, there is a constraint on the level or layer that deals with everyday reality that is not present in the dream level of consciousness. The constraint suggests an neural organization difference. We could chat about that, if you like. We might even discuss optical illusions.

The layer cake or any of the similar stacked domains metaphors have their limitations. There are qualitative differences in "levels of consciousness" that mere layers, stories of a building, and the like cannot begin to entertain. We should look for a much different metaphor or method of insight, without abandoning the insight we already have, namely, that consciousness seems to be a hierarchical arrangement in some sense, extending in both upward and downward directions of ... content, constraint, concentration. Perhaps we should attempt an aural metaphor that brings to bear the associations of hearing, listening, voice, music, and the like.

Perhaps there is something to be learned by thinking of consciousness as a process like music. We are aware that different cultures hear music differently and that perhaps this is learned in utero, so basic is the diatonic scale to our civilization, but so alien to others. I am deliberately leading us into a music-oriented metaphor because one already exists in neuropsychology. But before exploring that specific metaphor perhaps it would be instructive to consider what we know about sound and our abilities to discriminate differences in sounds. For instance, we know that we can tell the difference in voice with an instrument as crude as a tin can and string transmission device. The human ear can resolve

tonal differences and undertones to a high degree. We can tell our family and friends voices over the telephone and even notice certain kinds of emotion or tenseness in their voices. We can hear multiple notes, chords of music, and notice very slight differences in tempi. We understand melody and harmony almost "inately," but most of us are without words to express the different sensations. Musicians and musicologists can, but they describe the strategy of notes and rarely the emotions that are stimulated by certain kinds of music.

Perhaps we could discriminate among levels of consciousness the way we discriminate among childrens songs, popular ditties, popular music, rock, jazz, skat, and symphonic music. Each has an "idiom," a characteristic, that runs virtually true within, but not beyond the classification. In so-called "classical music" we find sub-categories that employ specific strategies of presentation ... and which evoke within us ... states of mind that truly are different from our prosaic, music-free lives. One of the modes of presentation is the fugue.

In music, a fugue (IPA: [fju?g]) is a type of contrapuntal composition. It begins with a theme stated by one of the voices playing alone. A second voice then enters and plays the same theme, though usually beginning on a different degree of the scale, while the first voice continues on with a contrapuntal accompaniment. The remaining voices enter one by one, each beginning by stating the same theme (with their first notes alternating between the same two different degrees of the scale). A common pattern of entry notes is tonic-dominant-tonic-dominant (or the same in reverse). The remainder of the fugue develops the material further using all of the voices and, usually, multiple statements of the theme. --Wikipedia

The term comes from the Latin fuga flight. The psychological term fugue, on the other hand, usually means a dissociative state in which the subject experiences an identity amnesia. Those of you who have experienced Bach's Contata and Fugue in D Minor in such a place as St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, may have experienced both simultaneously, for the progression of contrapuntal themes leaves little opportunity to be concerned with one's taxes or complexion or even hunger or pain. The consciousness is swept into the music and dissolves, to employ yet another metaphor.

I think that fugue is important to the understanding of levels of consciousness because it describes an overtaking of attention (music) and the consequent loss of identity (psychology), which is to say that one's attention is persuaded to focus on something despite one's apparent possession of free will. Hypnotism is such a process. There is throughout the literature on raised consciousness, levels of consciousness, and the like a consistent theme that personal identity is removed or the goal is to remove it, thus to experience something else. What else is difficult to describe, but perhaps it would be instructive to consider that self identity is a mental construct originally organized to function as a survival mechanism, an hypothetical homunculous created to posit the potential results of actions against, a strawman, as it were, to use as a model in risky situations and to store information about all past situations. Thus, loss of identity would suggest that the modeling process is absent.

Finally, there is another metaphor for thinking about consciousness. It is the powers metaphor, the rational, the abstract understanding of levels in our ratiocinative minds, such as the familiar "powers of ten" demonstrations you see from time to time. It is clear that when you imagine the earth from another galaxy millions of light years away that the microbe under your fingernail is exceedingly small—real, but small—and that to try to discuss that microbe in the terms of galaxies is futile. This is only to say that we must be exceedingly wary and careful in our use of vocabularies. What we are able to communicate easily at one power or level may be meaningless, or worse, obscuring to a different level. We are clear, therefore, that the interpretation of dreams is not so much about the details of the action, but the reasons behind these actions, yet the details color the action and help us make decisions about the interpretation.
--JB